Hi Graeme, thanks for making the time to catch up with me.
Thanks, George, for the opportunity as well to talk about this.
Graeme, can you comment on the service we provide where we investigate orphan software, we document what it does, we work out what intellectual property is in that software, and try and maintain it. We adopt it and maintain it while a broader strategy is determined. Do you agree that generally, this is the best approach?
George, I think you’ve hit three very important nails on the head there. In those moments where suddenly the orphan software becomes exposed, it becomes a hold up preventing something to happen then there’s that immediate need to determine what they need to do to unblock or to enable whatever that Orphaned piece of software is stopping. That might be a broader program or it might be a change that they need to implement for them to adapt to a business process that’s altered so there’s that immediate need what do we do now it also then exposes that look there is a true genuine need for this piece of orphan software to exist in the business so what’s that longer term direction you know do we do we consolidate its functionality into another piece of enterprise software that we have does that solution need to evolve or adapt in a different way or can it be replaced and basically those options of what any organisation in that state of play need to think through but they’ve got that first time pressure so they need to do something immediately to get the thing working again or to be enabled whatever the orphan software is preventing a change around then they also need to also say well what are we going to do longer term you know this problem exists we need a solution for it for the business how are we going to go about that then the third part of well how do you actually do that you know if this software might quite easily and I’ve seen it many times it could be 10 years old it’s hard to imagine but you know these pieces of software can exist in organisations for decades before this or this critical moment comes and so the knowledge of how it works isn’t there and so when you go to look for someone to help that can be a real challenge as well the technology you know ages quickly in it and it may not be a skill set you can find readily in the market you’re not going to have necessarily a vendor to pick it up either so there’s a lot of things that you then get confronted with as to how you actually evolve or take.
Graeme, so you can see that the service we provide where we investigate that orphan software is essential. A lot of people are in a sense of calm and a steady-state environment where things are working, but they’re sitting on these time bombs. I think they need to take some action to locate those things, bring Softlogic in so we can assess those particular solutions and find ways to maintain them and to look after them properly and keep them running reliably for the client.